


Surviving is Easier Than Living

by The Chronicler (AgentFrostbite)



Series: Hurting is Part of Healing [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: And it's in two pieces right now, Clint Barton & Tony Stark Friendship, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Gen, Healing is slow, I don't take sides in CW so no-one's favored here, Less angst and more happy but still lots of angst, Pepper Potts is a Force of Nature, Still no resolution, Still not canon compliant, Toni still isn't handling things well, Tony Stark Has A Heart, dealing with the aftermath, fem!tony/steve, pepper knows best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23561470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentFrostbite/pseuds/The%20Chronicler
Summary: Siberia was a mess, and there's no nicer way to say that. Toni's out of the Avengers, by her own choice, because she needs time to think, to process, toheal. The next few months may determine whether the exile is just a temporary break or a total split from the team for good. She just has to survive the transition first, but in all honesty, that's the easy bit. She's pulled off surviving several times before.Being her independent self again is gonna be much harder.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Hurting is Part of Healing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695832
Kudos: 99





	Surviving is Easier Than Living

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, before everyone starts jumping on the "We hate Steve" boat - and I do appreciate all the supportive comments; it means I've done a good job of writing the fight - this is a story in which mistakes were made on BOTH SIDES. I'm not absolving anyone of guilt. This is not going to be a bashing Steve story, and if that's not what you want to read, I'm sorry.

By the time she gets back home - after failing to catch Zemo and being told King T'challa already did it and confirming three times that Steve and Barnes are gone – she's empty and tired, and the cold doesn't hurt as much as she'd like it to. Her fingertips are white, which concerns JARVIS, but she's got a job to do. She's not in Siberia anymore; they'll heal.

Or maybe she'll replace them. Go full _Iron_ Woman. It's a fleeting thought. She'd never stomach the transition. She'd hear her mother crying in the back of her mind and lose her nerve.

The first thing she does upon getting home is tender her resignation. She'd written the form up a couple times, but never filled it out completely. It's cold, informal, tells nothing of what happened. She wakes Vision and makes him sign it, but not before she steps to the edge of tears and breaking down. He's half-JARVIS, and that half will listen. He signs it, she files it, and then she hecks off to a corner of the large yard with a gazebo. It's not the gazebo where Steve almost proposed to her. She'd burn that down, but then, it's not hers anymore. She's only waiting for Rhodey.

Rhodey is slow to get to her. He knows exactly where she is, but the braces are new and he's still struggling with the fact that he can't really walk, that it's the tech doing the moving for him. It hurts to watch, because this Rhodey, he needs help, and she's leaving him. It's almost enough to make her change her mind. Then she sees Steve and his blue eyes, his puppy dog smile, his ruffled bedhead. She sees Barnes and his arm and the sad, shrunken way he goes about things, always waiting for someone to kick him over. She sees them coming back furious or heartbroken – and she can't decide which is worse – and her staying will tear the team apart. This way, at least they don't have to make a choice.

"Heard you had a rough day," Rhodey calls once he's close. She snorts, a smirk appears, but they're half-hearted. Nothing like they should be. He sits next to her and they listen to the birds sing for exactly 60 seconds. "Steve's in a frenzy. He said you made them leave."

"I didn't _make_ them leave, I just made it the best option," she answers. She sounds dead. She wants to ask how he took hearing she resigned. She knows how bad an idea that is and doesn't. "The Tower's still yours, as is the compound. I'll retrofit stuff, but I'm not taking most visitors for a good couple months," she adds. "I'm pissed, but I still care." She chokes on the last word. Rhodey doesn't address it.

"Vision signed it?"

"He's the only one who I knew would."

"I would've." She looks at him. "You're right, I would've talked it over with you, but I would've signed it if you stayed firm." She smiles faintly.

"Still know what I'm thinking, even after all this time." She wants to lean on him, like she did when they were in college and she was bone tired from all the pressure and he was the one person who didn't give a shit about her grades beyond 'Don't make me get a new roommate.' She doesn't because she needs to maintain distance or she'll break. "I'm going back to Malibu. Back to where it started, try to pick up the pieces. Learn to live on my own again."

"You're never gonna be alone, Tones," Rhodey corrects. "You'll always have JARVIS, Pepper, Happy, me." He looks at her, she looks back, and he's serious. She respects that.

"And Vision," she adds. Rhodey chuckles.

"I don't know, he's pretty serious about his crush on Wanda," Rhodey jokes. Toni laughs. It's sad, it has a broken undercurrent, but it's a start. "I'll cover for you."

"I'll send you a postcard," she replies. Then she hugs him, and he hugs back. It's reassuring and grounding, it helps keep her in the here and now and makes the ache dull just a little. "Love you, Rhodey.

"Love you too, Toni." He lets her break it first, as always. "Now go, before they get suspicious." She smiles, gives a two fingered salute, stands, and walks away. It's her property, she knows it best, so she sneaks out to the shed where she stashed her car. The suit she'll leave, as a guard because she loves JARVIS but has never trusted security systems, and she drives away on the back road.

* * *

It's a long way to Malibu, and she wants to drive for as long as she can.

She arrives at the Manor as the sun is rising, and it's pretty much JARVIS that's driving and parking the car in the familiar garage. Everything lights up as she walks by, but DUM-E, U, and Butterfingers aren't there to greet her. They've been left at the Tower. Someone will bring them over eventually – probably Clint, 'cause he has a soft spot for her, no matter what he says – but for now it's her and JARVIS and the few suits she left there.

It feels empty. It feels like the kind of empty that's resting in the pit of her soul, cold and encompassing and insurmountable. It looms above her like some great beast with its maw gaping, eager to swallow her up. Everything's pristine; the cleaning staff she has that keeps the place up has done their job excellently, so there's no clouds of dust to add to the forlorn mood. It's neat and even and so impersonal.

This was her house, once upon a time. It's going to take a lot of tears, hours, and mess to make it home again.

The first thing she does is check the fridge; she's driven for way longer than recommended and the grief quelled her appetite while she was doing more important things. She finds nothing inside because it all went bad and got thrown out and she didn't call ahead because she didn't know her life was about to go to pieces. Then she leans on the counter and thinks about the state of her life. This is followed by a good hour of crying over her parents, her team, herself, all the lies and hurt and _everything_ in general. Once she's had her good floor cry, she tells JARVIS to have someone bring something over. She'll go shopping for food and clothes and whatever tomorrow.

It's Happy that shows up, with Burger King and a box of Krispy Kreme, and she cries for another ten minutes before pulling herself together and downing all of it. She knows how she gets when she grieves: she burns through her reserves faster and doesn't have the willpower to fill back up, so any opportunity to eat is going to be taken to the full potential. She'll shed the extra weight by the end.

That night is sleepless, lying in bed with a suit next to her to simulate someone else being in the building – because she sent Happy home so he didn't have to watch her fall to pieces and patch together just to fall apart again – and it doesn't work. She's lonely, she's paranoid, and it's like after the funeral all over again, except this time Aunt Peggy's not there to give Toni a good kick in the ass to get her moving again.

Peggy's spirit lives on because after a messy, broken, ugly week that Toni won't remember most of, Pepper shows up, throws a wetsuit at her, and says, "Get dressed; you're learning how to surf."

Toni's lived in California long enough that she really ought to know. She never bothered to learn, so Pepper enrolls the both of them in lessons, pays the instructor triple not to say anything about teaching _the_ Toni Stark or remark about the state Toni's in, and they surf. Toni wipes out for a week solid. Pepper drags her back to the beach, every morning, from 9:30 till 12, and then to various places around town for lunch. The traffic still sucks, and Toni only eats every other day. Toni bargains for going to lunch every third day by promising to have something every day – even if it's just a protein bar – and Pepper accepts.

Toni rewatches every movie she has in the house three times. Then she gets bored and starts reading books. The number of times she cries gradually drops from twice a day to twice a week, and by the time she tears through the entire bookshelf – with the exception of the first day wherein she cried for hours because Steve read voraciously and she'll forever look at a book and think of him – she's barely crying at all.

Clint is indeed the one who brings the baby bots back over, about two months into the separation. She cries when she sees him, he cries when he sees her, they hug and make JARVIS swear not to tell anyone. She literally bawls her eyes out when she sees her babies, and they chirp happily and cry with her because they missed their mommy, too. JARVIS is probably crying, somewhere in his programming. He's just as happy to see them as Toni is. Clint hangs around till 3, then leaves for the East Coast. Toni feels accomplished when she doesn't cry after he leaves.

Life slowly comes back. She spends two or three hours in her lab every day, reviewing old inventions and sporadically making new ones that usually get junked in a week. Coulson shows up with a request from SHIELD for new refraction cloaking equipment. She agrees and finally has a job. Having a job is nice, because it feels normal, and normality is finally becoming the rule and not the exception.

She sees the Avengers on TV the next week. She cries when she sees Steve. The tears don't last long, and that makes her feel hollow.

She drags herself to surf lessons the next morning, without Pepper – who stopped about a month and a half into it because of the time she was losing – and a week later, the instructor tells her she knows all he can teach her. She goes the next morning after that, wipes out five times, and keeps trying.

It's four months total before Toni feels like she's back to the spot she was before the Avengers. Not as wild and not as free, but independent and alive and actually doing something other than surviving. She looks at the phone for the first time since she left and seriously considers calling the Tower just to see who'd pick up. Then the nerves about talking to Steve or Bucky take back over and she dismisses the idea. What would she even say to them? Because now that she's _alive_ , she's not as angry or broken. She's…not sure what she is, and she can't talk to them until she knows. The phone sits untouched. Life grinds on in a semi-monotonous way. She'll get to it, when she's sure his voice won't kick her back to survival mode.

She still secretly hopes, despite what she insists to everyone else about thinking about him, that he's found a peace similar to hers.


End file.
